Sunday, March 22, 2015

Basic idea behind the mini barbed wire

Mini barbed
wire is always an interesting accessory in any war gaming theater.

We can find
many very good tutorials on how to make mini barbed wire on the web. Unfortunately, most of them use actual wire
to build the miniature mini barbed wire.
It looks more realistic in a diorama but it does have a down side. I tried that technique and I ended up having my
mini barbed wire all entangled the second time I used it.

What I
propose is an easy way of building a mini barbed wire network. It’s very fast to do and very fast to deploy
on the field. Considering that I use
pickets to hold everything in place, some can argue that those mini barbed wire
are more a “WWI” type. I cannot disagree
with them!

Material
required to make the mini barbed wire

To be able
to build our mini barbed wire, we will need the following material:

- - Plastic
netting like the one use to package vegetables at the grocery store

- - Grey
and silver paints

- - Press
wood board or Styrofoam board

- - Bamboo
skewer

- - Hot
clue

The useful
tools for the work are:

- Glue gun

- Pair of
scissor

- Cutter

- Paint brush

Assembly technique of the mini barbed wire

Step
one: prepare the mini barbed wire itself

Any plastic
netting can be used. Ideally, choose the
elastic ones. There are some which are
“not elastic” and they will not give the barbed wire look.

That type of netting is not suitable to do barbwire

This is the type to choose

The plastic
netting could be difficult to unfold.
The best is to cut open the net and then use an iron to straight
it. To avoid to have melted plastic on
your iron, put the temperature at the lowest and place your plastic net between
two sheets of waxed paper. Just iron it
like any piece of clothing.

Step two:
paint the mini barbed wire

To get the
steel color of the mini barbed wire, we must paint the netting with a silver
paint. Don’t worry if there is some
uncolored parts, it will add to the realism of your mini barbed wire.

Step three:
prepare the pickets which hold the mini barbed wire

Barbed wire
is not a fence. Your mini barbed wire
should not stand like it. It can loosely
hold in place. Ideally, poles holding
the barbed wire should be thin as possible.
Personally, I use mini bamboo skewer.
Those are a little bit out of scale but it gives a better stability to
your wire. The base in which the pole
is fixed can be either foam board or wood board. I prefer the latter because the weight of the
materiel avoids the mini barbed wire to type over.

Step four:
assemble the mini barbed wire

We are
almost there. We have everything at hand
to install our mini barbed wire in the field.

The
very last thing to do and the most enjoyable one is to use these mini barbed
wire in action.